I can’t help feeling like we engineers are shooting ourselves in the foot with the open source culture: Most challenging and interesting work is turning into unpaid (open source) hobby projects. Professional software engineering is more and more about cobbling together various open source software, fiddling with configuration files and other menial tasks. Also, where is my “open source lawyer” or “open source doctor” whose work I can download from GitHub for free and file my issues / complaints with there?

I guess this benefits the mediocre software engineer (who can now accomplish things by cobbling together open source that they would never be able to accomplish from scratch), and perhaps it’s also a plus for the top 0.001% who are good hustlers too and can make a career out of touring around conferences as some kind of nerd celebrities. But for the skilled and professional engineer (say top 5-25%) I’m starting to feel it’s a trap.

(Open source is great for basic infrastructure though, like operating systems, compilers, interpreters, frameworks like TensorFlow or PyTorch, etc. I’m definitely not against it in general.)